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  toys and pills and nonstop distractions. They could still choose our way; but they don't want to, they want to be exactly like you, God help them. And as they can't possibly do what you've done—at any rate within the time they've set themselves— they're foredoomed to frustration and disappointment, predestined to the misery of social breakdown and anarchy, and then to the misery of enslavement by tyrants. It's a completely foreseeable tragedy, and they're walking into it with their eyes open."

  "And we can't do anything about it," the Principal added.

  "Can't do anything," said Mr. Menon, "except go on doing what we're doing now and hoping against hope that the example of a nation that has found a way of being happily human may be imitated. There's very little chance of it; but it just might happen."

  "Unless Greater Rendang happens first."

  "Unless Greater Rendang happens first," Mr. Menon gravely agreed. "Meanwhile we have to get on with our job, which is education. Is there anything more that you'd like to hear about, Mr. Farnaby?"

  "Lots more," said Will. "For example, how early do you start your science teaching?"

  "We start it at the same time we start multiplication and division. First lessons in ecology."

  "Ecology? Isn't that a bit complicated?"

  "That's precisely the reason why we begin with it. Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it. Rub it in."

  "And let me add," said the Principal, "that we always teach the science of relationship in conjunction with the ethics of relationship. Balance, give and take, no excesses—it's the rule in nature and, translated out of fact into morality, it ought to be the rule among people. As I said before, children find it very easy to

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  understand an idea when it's presented to them in a parable about animals. We give them an up-to-date version of Aesop's Fables. Not the old anthropomorphic fictions, but true ecological fables with built-in, cosmic morals. And another wonderful parable for children is the story of erosion. We don't have any good examples of erosion here; so we show them photographs of what has happened in Rendang, in India and China, in Greece and the Levant, in Africa and America—all the places where greedy, stupid people have tried to take without giving, to exploit without love or understanding. Treat Nature well, and Nature will treat you well. Hurt or destroy Nature, and Nature will soon destroy you. In a Dust Bowl, 'Do as you would be done by' is self-evident—much easier for a child to recognize and understand than in an eroded family or village. Psychological wounds don't show—and anyhow children know so little about their elders. And, having no standards of comparison, they tend to take even the worst situation for granted, as though it were part of the nature of things. Whereas the difference between ten acres of meadow and ten acres of gullies and blowing sand is obvious. Sand and gullies are parables. Confronted by them, it's easy for the child to see the need for conservation and then to go on from conservation to morality—easy for him to go on from the Golden Rule in relation to plants and animals and the earth that supports them to the Golden Rule in relation to human beings. And here's another important point. The morality to which a child goes on from the facts of ecology and the parables of erosion is a universal ethic. There are no Chosen People in nature, no Holy Lands, no Unique Historical Revelations. Conservation morality gives nobody an excuse for feeling superior, or claiming special privileges. 'Do as you would be done by' applies to our dealings with all kinds of life in every part of the world. We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence. Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism."

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  "A few weeks ago," said Will after a moment of silence, "I was looking at Thorwald's book about what happened in eastern Germany between January and May of 1945. Have either of you read it?"

  They shook their heads.

  "Then don't," Will advised. "I was in Dresden five months after the February bombing. Fifty or sixty thousand civilians— mostly refugees running away from the Russians—burned alive in a single night. And all because little Adolf had never learned ecology," he smiled his flayed ferocious smile, "never been taught the first principles of conservation." One made a joke of it because it was too horrible to be talked about seriously.

  Mr. Menon rose and picked up his briefcase.

  "I must be going." He shook hands with Will. It had been a pleasure, and he hoped that Mr. Farnaby would enjoy his stay in Pala. Meanwhile, if he wanted to know more about Palanese education, he had only to ask Mrs. Narayan. Nobody was better qualified to act as a guide and instructor.

  "Would you like to visit some of the classrooms?" Mrs. Narayan asked, when the Under-Secretary had left.

  Will rose and followed her out of the room and along a corridor.

  "Mathematics," said the Principal as she opened a door. "And this is the Upper Fifth. Under Mrs. Anand."

  Will bowed as he was introduced. The white-haired teacher gave a welcoming smile and whispered, "We're deep, as you see, in a problem."

  He looked about him. At their desks a score of boys and girls were frowning, in a concentrated, pencil-biting silence, over their notebooks. The bent heads were sleek and dark. Above the white or khaki shorts, above the long gaily colored skirts, the golden bodies glistened in the heat. Boys' bodies that showed the cage of the ribs beneath the skin, girls' bodies, fuller, smoother, with the swell of small breasts, firm, high-set, elegant as the inventions

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  of a rococo sculptor of nymphs. And everyone took them completely for granted. What a comfort, Will reflected, to be in a place where the Fall was an exploded doctrine!

  Meanwhile Mrs. Anand was explaining—sotto voce so as not to distract the problem solvers from their task—that she always divided her classes into two groups. The group of the visualizers, who thought in geometrical terms, like the ancient Greeks, and the group of the nonvisualizers who preferred algebra and imageless abstractions. Somewhat reluctantly Will withdrew his attention from the beautiful unfallen world of young bodies and resigned himself to taking an intelligent interest in human diversity and the teaching of mathematics.

  They took their leave at last. Next door, in a pale-blue classroom decorated with paintings of tropical animals, Bodhisattvas and their bosomy Shaktis, the Lower Fifth were having their biweekly lesson in Elementary Applied Philosophy. Breasts here were smaller, arms thinner and less muscular. These philosophers were only a year away from childhood.

  "Symbols are public," the young man at the blackboard was saying as Will and Mrs. Narayan entered the room. He drew a row of little circles, numbered them 1, 2, 3, 4, and n. "These are people," he explained. Then from each of the little circles he drew a line that connected it with a square at the left of the board. S he wrote in the center of the square. "S is the system of symbols that the people use when they want to talk to one another. They all speak the same language—English, Palanese, Eskimo, it depends where they happen to live. Words are public; they belong to all the speakers of a given language; they're listed in dictionaries. And now let's look at the things that happen out there." He pointed through the open window. Gaudy against a white cloud, half a dozen parrots came sailing into view, passed behind a tree and were gone. The teacher drew a second square at the opposite side of the board, labeled it E for "events" and connected it by lines to the circles. "What happens out there is

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  public—or at least fairly public," he qualified. "And what happens when somebody speaks or writes words—that's also public. But the things that go on inside these little circles are private. Private." He laid a hand on his chest. "Private." He rubbed his forehead. "Private." He touched his eyelids and the tip of his nose with a brown forefinger. "Now let's mak
e a simple experiment. Say the word 'pinch.' "

  "Pinch," said the class in ragged unison. "Pinch . . ."

  "P-I-N-C-H—pinch. That's public, that's something you can look up in the dictionary. But now pinch yourselves. Hard! Harder!"

  To an accompaniment of giggles, of aies and ows, the children did as they were told.

  "Can anybody feel what the person sitting next to him is feeling?"

  There was a chorus of noes.

  "So it looks," said the young man, "as though there were-— let's see, how many are we?" He ran his eyes over the desks before him. "It looks as though there were twenty-three distinct and separate pains. Twenty-three in this one room. Nearly three thousand million of them in the whole world. Plus the pains of all the animals. And each of these pains is strictly private. There's no way of passing the experience from one center of pain to another center of pain. No communication except indirectly through S." He pointed to the square at the left of the board, then to the circles at the center. "Private pains here in 1, 2, 3, 4, and n. News about private pains out here at S, where you can say 'pinch,' which is a public word listed in a dictionary. And notice this: there's only one public word, 'pain,' for three thousand million private experiences, each of which is probably about as different from all the others as my nose is different from your noses and your noses are different from one another. A word only stands for the ways in which things or happenings of the same general kind are like one another. That's why the word is

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  public. And, being public, it can't possibly stand for the ways in which happenings of the same general kind are unlike one another."

  There was a silence. Then the teacher looked up and asked a question.

  "Does anyone here know about Mahakasyapa?"

  Several hands were raised. He pointed his finger at a little girl in a blue skirt and a necklace of shells sitting in the front row.

  "You tell us, Amiya."

  Breathlessly and with a lisp, Amiya began.

  "Mahakathyapa," she said, "wath the only one of the di-thipleth that underthtood what the Buddha wath talking about."

  "And what was he talking about?"

  "He wathn't talking. That'th why they didn't underthtand."

  "But Mahakasyapa understood what he was talking about even though he wasn't talking—is that it?"

  The little girl nodded. That was it exactly. "They thought he wath going to preatth a thermon," she said, "but he didn't. He jutht picked a flower and held it up for everybody to look at."

  "And that was the sermon," shouted a small boy in a yellow loincloth, who had been wriggling in his seat, hardly able to contain his desire to impart what he knew. "But nobody could underthand that kind of a thermon. Nobody but Mahakathyapa."

  "So what did Mahakasyapa say when the Buddha held up that flower?"

  "Nothing!" the yellow loincloth shouted triumphantly.

  "He jutht thmiled," Amiya elaborated. "And that thowed the Buddha that he underthtood what it wath all about. So he thmiled back, and they jutht that there, thmiling and thmiling."

  "Very good," said the teacher. "And now," he turned to the yellow loincloth, "let's hear what you think it was that Mahakasyapa understood."

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  There was a silence. Then, crestfallen, the child shook his head. "I don't know," he mumbled. "Does anyone else know?"

  There were several conjectures. Perhaps he'd understood that people get bored with sermons—even the Buddha's sermons. Perhaps he liked flowers as much as the Compassionate One did. Perhaps it was a white flower, and that made him think of the Clear Light. Or perhaps it was blue, and that was Shiva's color.

  "Good answers," said the teacher. "Especially the first one. Sermons are pretty boring—especially for the preacher. But here's a question. If any of your answers had been what Maha-kasyapa understood when Buddha held up the flower, why didn't he come out with it in so many words?" "Perhapth he wathn't a good thpeaker." "He was an excellent speaker." "Maybe he had a sore throat."

  "If he'd had a sore throat, he wouldn't have smiled so hap-pily."

  "You tell us," called a shrill voice from the back of the room. "Yes, you tell us," a dozen other voices chimed in. The teacher shook his head. "If Mahakasyapa and the Compassionate One couldn't put it into words, how can I? Meanwhile let's take another look at these diagrams on the blackboard. Public words, more or less public events, and then people, completely private centers of pain and pleasure. "'Completely private?" he questioned. "But perhaps that isn't quite true. Perhaps, after all, there is some kind of communication between the circles—not in the way I'm communicating with you now, through words, but directly. And maybe that was what the Buddha was talking about when his wordless flower-sermon was over. 'I have the treasure of the unmistakable teachings,' he said to his disciples, 'the wonderful Mind of Nirvana, the true form without form, beyond all words, the teaching to be given and received outside of all doctrines. This I have now handed to

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  Mahakasyapa.' " Picking up the chalk again, he traced a rough ellipse that enclosed within its boundaries all the other diagrams on the board—the little circles representing human beings, the square that stood for events, and the other square that stood for words and symbols. "All separate," he said, "and yet all one. People, events, words—they're all manifestations of Mind, of Suchness, of the Void. What Buddha was implying and what Mahakasyapa understood was that one can't speak these teachings, one can only be them. Which is something you'll all discover when the moment comes for your initiation."

  "Time to move on," the Principal whispered. And when the door had closed behind them and they were standing again in the corridor, "We use this same kind of approach," she said to Will, "in our science teaching, beginning with botany." "Why with botany?"

  "Because it can be related so easily to what was being talked about just now—the Mahakasyapa story." "Is that your starting point?"

  "No, we start prosaically with the textbook. The children are given all the obvious, elementary facts, tidily arranged in the standard pigeonholes. Undiluted botany—that's the first stage. Six or seven weeks of it. After which they get a whole morning of what we call bridge building. Two and a half hours during which we try to make them relate everything they've learned in the previous lessons to art, language, religion, self-knowledge."

  "Botany and self-knowledge—how do you build that bridge?"

  "It's really quite simple," Mrs. Narayan assured him. "Each of the children is given a common flower—a hibiscus, for example, or better still (because the hibiscus has no scent) a gardenia. Scientifically speaking, what is a gardenia? What does it consist of? Petals, stamens, pistil, ovary, and all the rest of it. The children are asked to write a full analytical description of the flower, illustrated by an accurate drawing. When that's done there's a

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  short rest period, at the close of which the Mahakasyapa story is read to them and they're asked to think about it. Was Buddha giving a lesson in botany? Or was he teaching his disciples something else? And, if so, what?" "What indeed?"

  "And of course, as the story makes clear, there's no answer that can be put into words. So we tell the boys and girls to stop | thinking and just look. 'But don't look analytically,' we tell them, 'don't look as scientists, even as gardeners. Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you. Look at it as though you'd never seen anything of the kind before, as though it had no name and belonged to no recognizable class. Look at it alertly but passively, receptively, without labeling or judging or comparing. And as you look at it, inhale its mystery, breathe in the spirit of sense, the smell of the wisdom of the Other Shore.' "

  "All this," Will commented, "sounds very like what Dr. Robert was saying at the initiation ceremony."

  "Of course it does," said Mrs. Narayan. "Learning to take the Mahakasyapa's-eye view of things is the best preparation for
the moksha-medicine experience. Every child who comes to initiation comes to it after a long education in the art of being receptive. First the gardenia as a botanical specimen. Then the same gardenia in its uniqueness, the gardenia as the artist sees it, the even more miraculous gardenia seen by the Buddha and Mahakasyapa. And it goes without saying," she added, "that we don't confine ourselves to flowers. Every course the children take is punctuated by periodical bridge-building sessions. Everything from dissected frogs to the spiral nebulae, it all gets looked at receptively as well as conceptually, as a fact of aesthetic or spiritual experience as well as in terms of science or history or economics. Training in receptivity is the complement and antidote to training in analysis and symbol manipulation. Both kinds of

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  training are absolutely indispensable. If you neglect either of them you'll never grow into a fully human being."

  There was a silence. "How should one look at other people?" Will asked at last. "Should one take the Freud's-eye view or the Cezanne's-eye view? The Proust's-eye view or the Buddha's-eye view?"

  Mrs. Narayan laughed. "Which view are you taking of me?" she asked.

  "Primarily, I suppose, the sociologist's-eye view," he answered. "I'm looking at you as the representative of an unfamiliar culture. But I'm also being aware of you receptively. Thinking, if you don't mind my saying so, that you seem to have aged remarkably well. Well aesthetically, well intellectually and psychologically, and well spiritually, whatever that word means— and if I make myself receptive it means something important. Whereas, if I choose to project instead of taking in, I can conceptualize it into pure nonsense." He uttered a mildly hyenalike laugh.

  "If one chooses to," said Mrs. Narayan, "one can always substitute a bad ready-made notion for the best insights of receptivity. The question is, why should one want to make that kind of choice? Why shouldn't one choose to listen to both parties and harmonize their views? The analyzing tradition-bound concept maker and the alertly passive insight receiver—neither is infallible; but both together can do a reasonably good job."